ZaReason UltraLap 430 pairs penguin power with Ultrabook form factor

Review: It stands out in a landscape largely bereft of Linux-powered Ultrabooks.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard on the UltraLap 430 is acceptable, but not stellar. The keys are small and round with a lot of space between them, and the keyswitches didn't feel quite as clean and clicky as I would have liked. Key layout is spacious and typing is comfortable. Most welcome are the dedicated keys for page up, page down, home, end, delete, and insert.

The keyboard has alt and control keys on both sides of the spacebar. The single Windows key, which is on the left side of the spacebar, is covered with a sticker bearing Tux, the Linux mascot. The key worked as you would expect a Windows key to work under Linux.

Unfortunately, I didn’t like the feel of the touchpad on the UltraLap 430. The surface of the touchpad has a grippy texture that felt unnatural to me. The surface itself doesn’t click, but there is a section at the bottom separated by a line that can be pressed down on the right and left side to perform clicks.

The faux buttons worked mostly as expected, but proved problematic for click-and-drag operations. During my tests, it tended to drop the dragged item prematurely. I eventually found that I was more comfortable performing click operations by tapping the surface of the touchpad (using a double-tap to click-and-drag works very well). The touchpad also supports two-finger scrolling and two-finger right-clicking without any issues.

Additionally, the touchpad’s palm detection could be better. While I was typing this article, I’d occasionally move focus to another window by accident when my palm brushed against the touchpad.

Software

Software is obviously a critical part of the equation for a Linux laptop. ZaReason supports a number of Linux distributions on the UltraLap, including Fedora, Debian, Mint, and several flavors of Ubuntu. The review unit we received came with version 13 of Linux Mint, an increasingly popular derivative of Ubuntu. It was configured out of the box with the MATE desktop environment, a fork of the traditional GNOME 2.x desktop.

Although I generally prefer Ubuntu and Unity, the Mint and MATE configuration proved to be a productivity-friendly pairing. It’s a configuration that just works and is relatively intuitive out of the box. The default application set is pretty good, bundling in The GIMP, GThumb, Firefox, Thunderbird, XChat, Banshee, LibreOffice, Cheese, and the standard GNOME utilities.

I tested a number of standard operations to see whether they worked correctly in the default Linux environment. The webcam worked flawlessly when I tested it with the Cheese camera applications. The card reader worked fine with a standard SD card, mounting it automatically and making it accessible in the Nautilus file manager.

I also had no trouble streaming a video file from a Samba share on my Synology NAS. When I played the video file, the audio worked as expected. I was able to adjust speaker volume and screen brightness by holding down the Fn key and hitting the relevant function keys at the top of the keyboard. This was particularly excellent—it's sometimes difficult to get a laptop's multimedia keys to perform their expected functions on Linux.

Suspend and resume worked consistently, but the resume process isn’t quite as smooth as I would have liked. The system will suspend when the lid is closed, but it won’t automatically resume when the lid is subsequently opened again. In order to wake up the computer from its suspended state, I had to hit the power button on the side. The Wi-Fi component also doesn’t automatically reconnect when the computer is resuming from suspend; I have to hit the function button that toggles the Wi-Fi status before it comes back to life. (ZaReason says they are aware of the Wi-Fi issue and will have a patch ready shortly). But it’s worth noting that suspend/resume and the boot process are pretty fast on the UltraLap, likely thanks to the use of an SSD for the system drive.

In day-to-day use, the UltraLap 430 works largely as you would expect for a Linux system. I was able to install the software that I needed and use it productively for writing articles and code, responding to e-mail, and surfing the Web. During a day of unplugged use, I was able to get about five and a half hours of battery life.

Conclusion

There is a fairly obvious pattern that emerges in this review. The UltraLap 430 adequately meets the needs of the user in every way that counts, but it doesn’t really stand out as a particularly great ultrabook. The differentiating feature is the Linux pre-installation and the fact that it offers Linux enthusiasts a known-good configuration.

The value of pre-installation, however, shouldn’t be underestimated. For some Linux enthusiasts, pre-installation is a valuable service that makes it both safe and practical to commit to a Linux laptop. It’s arguably better than buying an ultrabook off the shelf from a conventional OEM and praying that it works.

Consider, for example, a thread in the Ubuntu Forums where a buyer of the shiny Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A (an impressive ultrabook that we recently reviewed) outlines the technical difficulties he faced after installing Ubuntu 12.04 on the system. The user experienced random freezes, reported a number of features didn’t work properly out of the box, and discovered the system wouldn’t consistently suspend when the lid was closed.

Although there are ways to tweak configuration to address many of the issues, it can be a difficult and time-consuming process. It’s also often difficult to find an OEM system that will actually work with Linux out of the box. ZaReason’s UltraLap 430 fared far better in this regard than that Asus Zenbook.

We’ve seen a lot of concern from Linux enthusiasts in our audience about the arrival of UEFI Secure Boot, which will be present on practically all Windows 8 computers. Although it will not be difficult to disable Secure Boot on x86 systems, a growing number of Linux users are uncomfortable with the implications of the feature. Individuals who feel strongly about the issue might also be interested in buying a Linux system from a dedicated pre-installation vendor.

Linux users looking for a system that comes with the platform preloaded naturally have a much narrower array of systems available to them than conventional PC buyers. Considering the dearth of available Linux-powered Ultrabooks, the UltraLap 430 is a welcome choice. That said, it doesn't outshine more refined systems from mainstream PC vendors. The previously mentioned Asus Zenbook offers better build quality, a higher resolution display, and a slightly lighter chassis for a similar price. Of course, the Zenbook's superiority as an Ultrabook doesn't count for much to a Linux user given that the system can't acceptably run the platform.

Ultimately, the UltraLap 430 presents a fairly straightforward set of trade-offs. It doesn’t offer the slickest Ultrabook hardware, but it does work reliably out of the box with all of the features intact. There are still some important areas where we think that ZaReason could have done better, however, especially with the display resolution.